-------- NUCLEAR (by country)

-------- china

Target Trulock

EDITORIAL •
July 28, 2000
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-200072818187.htm

After all these many Clinton years of Chinese espionage during which, coincidence or not, nuclear codes have been downloaded, satellite technology has gone missing, top-secret hard drives have been "lost," supercomputer technology has been sold and nuclear facilities have all but gone up in smoke, Americans may now finally rejoice that the nation's security is assured: The FBI has seized Notra Trulock's desktop computer.

Mr. Trulock, of course, is the former Department of Energy counterintelligence chief who first blew the whistle on Chinese espionage penetrations of American nuclear weapons laboratories two years ago. Whistleblowers, as everyone knows, make a lot of noise, shrill, penetrating, sometimes commanding - at first. But even the loudest noises fade away. In the bureaucratic calm after the political storm, Mr. Trulock was quietly demoted and then forced out of the Energy Department by senior department officials who disputed his findings that Chinese spies had stolen the know-how to produce every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, including that nuke in the crown, the W-88 thermonuclear warhead.

While working for TRW Inc., Mr. Trulock decided this year to write "a 'personal reflections-type' manuscript" about his experiences, as he told National Review Online last week. So he did, taking care, he said, not to include any classified information. He sent the document to the DOE for a security review this spring, before submitting to and passing a polygraph test intended to reveal any disclosure of classified information. Until two weeks ago, there the matter laid - not to mention the article, which, Mr. Trulock said, was just "sitting around in maybe a half-dozen or so people's hard drives."

Then came a cluster of events. Mr. Trulock was fired by TRW, "under pressure from the Energy Department, according to people close to the case," as this newspaper's Bill Gertz wrote. Then National Review magazine published the article, which, while it may not contain information that is classified, contains plenty of information that is damaging to the Clinton administration on its historic bungle of its duty to protect the nation's defense secrets. Then came the knock at Mr. Trulock's door. Without a warrant, FBI agents coerced Mr. Trulock's landlord - "with threats of breaking in doors and bringing in 'media people,' " Mr. Trulock wrote Congress this week - to open up for an unlawful search of Mr. Trulock's Northern Virginia townhouse. Agents seized his desktop computer hard drive, carting away not only files on the article in question, but personal and financial files as well.

How can they do that? All too easily, post-Elian, when Americans seem increasingly content to allow the federal government's ends to justify the federal government's means. And why did they do that? The FBI says Mr. Trulock may have revealed state secrets, although one has to wonder, not entirely flippantly, whether there are any left. Mr. Trulock sees the incident as an unacceptable act of government retribution against a citizen who spoke out. "This is what happens to whistle blowers who speak truth to power," he told this newspaper's Bill Gertz. "The notion that there is classified information on [the computer] is outrageous."

Frankly, that's not all that is outrageous about this extremely alarming abuse of power. Mr. Trulock has alerted both House and Senate Intelligence committees to the details of this irregular FBI operation, which calls out for a thorough investigation into whether Mr. Trulock has indeed been subjected to the forces of intimidation and retaliation that this administration has become so accustomed to wielding.

-------- iraq

Iraq Prepares for Attack

NewsMax.com
Sunday, July 30, 2000
http://www.NewsMax.com/articles/?a=2000/7/30/102329

Saddam Hussein is poised to launch a full-scale military invasion of Kurdistan, according to a report late last week in the Times of London.

If the Iraqi attack takes place, it will be a re-enactment of a similar attack Saddam Hussein made in August 1996, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election.

At the time, President Clinton vowed to defend Kurdistan, and several cruise missiles were fired at radar stations. Critics wondered why the Clinton administration fired the cruise missiles at radar stations nowhere near Iraq's military operation against the Kurds.

Hussein quickly backed off.

The Times of London reports, "Six Iraqi infantry and mechanised army divisions are poised on the edge of Kurdistan, awaiting President Saddam Hussein's order to strike in a blow that would challenge America's pledge to protect the Kurds."

The Times says the Iraqi attack plan, entitled Operation Justice, is aimed at capturing Suleimaniya, a large Kurdish city, and two dams that supply water to central Iraq.

"The plan was disclosed by an Iraqi military intelligence source who recently defected. He said it entailed three divisions of infantry, accompanied by three armoured divisions, driving north from three separate locations and sweeping towards Suleimaniya, headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Jalal Talabani. Tanks and armoured personnel carriers had been moved into place south of Chamchamal, Kufri and Kallar. A total of 800 tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) had joined the infantry divisions, each numbering 12,000 men, with Republican Guard divisions in reserve."

The Times noted the 1996 parallel: "The Iraqi operation would mirror its August 1996 invasion of Kurdistan, when Saddam's troops swept north to Irbil and destroyed the headquarters of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, killing hundreds of supporters. CIA agents escaped just ahead of the Iraqi columns, leaving files which Saddam used to track down and murder their associates."

----

Ex-Arms Inspector Returns to Iraq Reuters

Washington Post
Sunday, July 30, 2000; Page A29
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-07/30/071l-073000-idx.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 29-Former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter, once accused by Iraq of spying for the United States, returned today to film a documentary about weapons sites and the impact of U.N. sanctions.

Ritter said on arrival in Baghdad that he hoped his trip could help break the impasse between Iraq and the United Nations over the suspended inspections program and Iraq's allegedly continuing efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. officials criticized the trip. "He is going to places where he was denied access as an inspector," a White House national security spokesman said. "We can all predict that the places he will go to will be thoroughly sanitized and the Iraqis will try to reap as much PR from this as possible."

Calling his trip a "risky maneuver," Ritter told reporters the aim of his documentary was to judge whether Iraq had rebuilt its arsenal since U.N. inspectors left in December 1998, just before Western warplanes bombed Iraq in retaliation for its obstruction of the inspection regime.

The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution last December that offers to ease trade sanctions if Iraq allows the U.N. weapons inspectors to return. Baghdad has rejected the resolution, saying it will not allow inspectors back until international sanctions imposed on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait are lifted entirely. The U.N. resolution sets up a new arms inspection body to replace the former U.N. Special Commission, for which Ritter worked.

Iraq says its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs have been dismantled. The head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, Hussam Mohammed Amin, said Ritter was in Iraq "to film a documentary on the impact of the unjust embargo on the Iraqi people and [show] that Iraq has no more weapons of mass destruction."

-------- kazakhstan

Explosion closes Soviet-era atom test site for good

By Shamil Zhumatov,
July 30 2000
Reuters
Ndunlks@aol.com

KURCHATOV, Kazakhstan - A controlled weekend explosion which made the vast Kazakh steppe shake has closed for good what was the world's largest nuclear test range at Semipalatinsk.

The Soviet-era site, where more than 500 nuclear explosions were conducted during the Cold War years between 1949 and 1989, was closed on Saturday after the last of 181 underground tunnels at the complex collapsed in the explosion.

U.S Deputy Defence Secretary Susan Koch said the project, conducted jointly with the United States, had not only closed the test complex but also had opened the way to peaceful scientific work at the site.

``This is...the largest such test site to be closed and the certainly the only one to be closed through cooperative efforts,'' Koch told Reuters.

``We are very happy as this has been a model of cooperation, it has worked smoothly and quickly and is a tribute to the... scientists who realise the potential use of the tests for CTBT.''

The blast, termed the Omega-3 calibration experiment, destroyed the last infrastructure for atomic testing in Kazakhstan, a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which once had the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal.

The blast was conducted at tunnel 160, part of the warren of passages under the 18,000 square metre (4.5-acre) grounds.

The explosion, which sent a cloud of dust over the steppe and made the earth shake, was part of a project involving the U.S. Defence Department and the Kazakh National Nuclear Centre.

It was funded by the Defence Department's Cooperative Threat Reduction Program since Kazakhstan in 1993 signed a treaty to eliminate all nuclear weapons infrastructure.

The programme allotted $172 million in the early 1990s to support disarmament in Kazakhstan. The efforts are monitored from the town of Kurchatov, home to the country's nuclear centre and about 100 km (60 miles) from the test range.

MODEL TO WOULD-BE NUCLEAR NATIONS

Koch said Kazakhstan was an model to aspiring nuclear powers.

``This is an example of commitment to arms reduction and non- proliferation...a successful nation without nuclear weapons,'' she said. ``Its security is enhanced by being non-nuclear.''

A news release said data from the calibration experiment would help scientists to identify nuclear tests more precisely and distinguish them from earthquakes.

But the test site, at the Degelen mountains, 150 km (90 miles) from Semipalatinsk town, carries a legacy of death and disease. A decade after the last test, health problems are rife.

Many babies born in the region have congenital deformities, while cancer, mental illness and muscular dystrophy are common.

A United Nations study in 1998 said agriculture and land systems had been severely contaminated by radioactive elements and called for international aid to clean up the mess.

Yury Cherednin, the head of Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Centre, said blocking the tunnels was a key step for safety.

``First, the tunnels are now closed to people and animals,'' he told Reuters. ``Second, radioactive contaminated water can no longer come out to surface so the entire area will be cleaner.''

Kazakhstan's huge territory was often used in Soviet times for manufacturing or testing lethal arms. The town of Stepnogorsk was used to produce biological weapons such as anthrax, usually tested in the receding Aral Sea.

Cherednin said U.S. support now allowed Kazakh scientists to participate in international and commercial projects.

``It was not easy for specialists to switch to new projects,'' he said. ``But on the positive side, we have moral satisfaction that never again will our land be used for nuclear tests.''

----

Kazakstan Closes Nuke Test Facility

Associated Press
By MICHAEL ROTHBART
From: Ndunlks@aol.com

POLYGON NUCLEAR TEST SITE, Kazakstan (AP) - An international team of scientists destroyed the last of Kazakstan's nuclear test facilities Saturday, scratching the Central Asian nation from the list of nuclear-capable countries.

Kazakstan, a former Soviet republic, has worked with the United States since 1995 to destroy silo launchers for intercontinental missiles and other nuclear weapons at the vast nuclear testing grounds in the rocky steppes of northern Kazakstan.

The controlled detonation of 100 tons of explosives in the final remaining tunnel of the Polygon test site effectively ends Kazakstan's status as a nation capable of testing and launching nuclear weapons.

As officials watched from a hillside several miles away, a ball of flame leapt from the tunnel entrance, followed by a shock wave and blast of wind. The explosion was used to calibrate equipment at seismic stations around the world to help them monitor future underground explosions.

``The event we witnessed today was significant for all of us,'' said Vladimir Shkolnik, Kazakstan's minister of energy, trade and industry. ``Two issues were resolved, one to do with threat reduction and the second to do with our ability to monitor future secret tests.''

Susan Koch, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction, said it was ``a truly landmark event, one the world has never seen before: the elimination of a country's entire infrastructure for nuclear weapons. We hope this will be an example to other nations.''

Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union set off 470 nuclear explosions at the testing grounds. More than 100 of the tests took place above ground.

The local population was not warned about possible ill effects of radiation. The area is sparsely populated, but people living downwind as far as the city of Semipalatinsk, 125 miles to the east of the Polygon test site, suffered aftereffects of nuclear radiation, including high incidences of birth defects and cancer.

Dubbed Omega 3, Saturday's explosion concluded a five-year cooperative program between the Kazak and U.S. governments.

The joint effort, organized under the international Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, closed 118 tunnels and 13 boreholes at the test site.

The test site, once the world's largest nuclear testing ground covering 32,800 square miles, was ordered shut down in 1991 by President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

-------- russia

Mike Sigov:Putin gains from U.S. missile plan

July 30, 2000
http://www.toledoblade.com/editorial/sigov/0g30sigo.htm

Russian President Vladimir Putin may have a mediocre KGB service record. But he is no fool.

He may even be an ingenious politician.

The Russian president stands to score big in his drive to restore Russia's superpower status - at the expense of international security - during the upcoming Russian-Indian summit.

That's by continuing to capitalize on his success undermining U.S. national missile defense plans to counter the perceived missile threats from "states of concern," such as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

He has artfully played this card by developing what appears to be a feasible plan to intercept missiles soon after their launch rather than in space as the U.S. proposes. The response of America's European allies to Mr. Putin's plan has been largely positive.

His first big success was earlier this month when China signed up for "strategic partnership" with Moscow to counter the U.S. policy..

This "strategic partnership" is not something to take lightly, despite Russian and Chinese claims that it's "not meant to be against anyone."

But who are they fooling? China is still a Communist dictatorship and Russia is moving toward autocracy. Such states need external enemies to justify the tyranny of their leaders.

Mr. Putin did well for himself during the recent G-8 summit on Okinawa where Germany and France expressed skepticism - bordering on opposition - about the U.S. plan.

His use of the thaw in relations between the Koreas to demonstrate North Korea's trustworthiness was brilliant. The U.S. argument that North Korea is the primary missile threat to the U.S. lost its persuasiveness.

What Mr. Putin supposedly did was negotiate a deal with North Korea. He broke the news during the G-8 summit. North Korea allegedly proposed scrapping its nuclear missile program in exchange for foreign help with rockets for space exploration.

One can only guess what kind of a deal Mr. Putin struck with Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, in Pyongyang earlier this month, but most experts agree that the offer can't be taken at face value.

Their skepticism is justified if only because those rockets could be used to deliver nuclear warheads.

Now Mr. Putin stands to extend his diplomatic success to India.

India has already announced its readiness to sign the "strategic partnership" with Russia. Not unlike China, India is a major buyer of Russian weapons. China has a territorial claim to Taiwan. India and Pakistan have an unresolved territorial dispute that periodically erupts into armed clashes.

While it's unlikely that China, Russia, or India will soon be U.S. military adversaries, each of them is gaining bargaining power against the U.S. by sticking together. .

By signing up, India would be able to get more military aid from Moscow. India is in a hurry to gain Moscow's political and military support as its rift with Pakistan escalates.

But India's "strategic alliance" with Moscow could tilt the military balance between India and Pakistan and result in a nuclear conflict. Characteristically, Pakistan's foreign ministry recently announced that it would likely use nuclear means should it be attacked, if only with conventional weapons.

And, of course, Mr. Putin's timing is perfect again. He is not a Judo Black Belt for nothing.

He knows perfectly well that the American missile defense plan is in limbo and that it could be scrapped given the recent test failure and growing skepticism by experts.

So Mr. Putin is in a hurry to capitalize on the scare.

It would take a considerable and coordinated effort on the part of the U.S. and its Western allies to counter Mr. Putin's diplomatic success and see that India gives up the idea of a "strategic partnership" with Moscow.

The deadline is October, when India and Russia are planning to hold their summit.

Mike Sigov, a Russian-born journalist, is a staff writer for The Blade.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

-------- arizona

Uranium's legacy for Navajo miners is a painful death

Bergen Record Corp.
Sunday, July 30, 2000
By DEBORAH HASTINGS
The Associated Press
http://www.bergen.com/morenews/hot30200007305.htm

COVE, Ariz. -- Inside the stifling cinder-block house of Dorothy Joe, nothing moves but waves of grief. One by one, the old widow and her children begin to sob, as if despair were contagious. The weeping circle begins and ends with her, sitting at the dining-room table, staring at weathered hands as if they held answers.

She murmurs in Navajo, describing the white man's prized uranium and how it destroyed her husband.

"They never told us it would kill us," says David Joe, 38, choking on his tears. "I'm sorry," the son says, drawing a deep breath. "I'm sorry."

They received $100,000 from the government for the death of Raymond Joe, who scraped radioactive rock from surrounding mountains to fuel the Cold War. The conflict never turned hot, but it killed Ray Joe just the same.

He died six years ago, but his family is inconsolable, as if he were just now drawing his last breath from these stagnant rooms.

Lung disease has killed at least 400 uranium miners on this reservation, according to the Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, a Navajo advocacy group.

The Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles in the Four Corners area, where the boundaries of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet like the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

Here lies the world's largest deposit of uranium ore, and the Navajo who have lived on it for seven centuries. Neither troubled the other until the 1940s, when mining companies began blasting holes in stippled sandstone cliffs.

Virtually unburdened by health, safety, or pollution regulations, the mines ran at least two shifts every day for nearly 40 years. By the 1980s, decreased demand closed the mines.

By then, Navajo men happy for the work and ignorant of radiation had loaded millions of tons of ore into open rail cars.

They wore no protective masks or clothing. They ate their lunches in holes choked with radioactive dust. They drank mine water that would have triggered a Geiger counter. They staggered home to wives who washed their filthy overalls with the family laundry.

The dying started in the 1960s. In places such as Cove, there are hardly any old men. Instead, there are poisonous dumps, contaminated springs, and thousands of gaping mines.

Recently declassified documents show the government knew from the start it was playing with poison, but concealed the dangers.

In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and apologized for failing to protect uranium workers and their families. It ordered payments of up to $100,000 to miners in Wyoming, Washington State, and the Four Corners area, as well as to others who lived in the Nevada Test Site's fallout.

The money did not come easily. To get it, the Navajo had to produce documents, which have no place among their people. Marriage certificates. Death certificates. Pieces of paper unable to convey whole truths.

A special tribal court was convened to verify marriages, births, and deaths, a process that takes months. Witnesses must appear "to verify, sometimes, a person's existence," said Timothy Benally, a former miner who leads the victims committee. "We had six people die while their claims were pending."

On July 12, Congress amended the compensation act, increasing benefits and reducing paperwork. Still, the Navajo say it is not enough.

"Nothing can equal a human life," says Dorothy Joe.

Like the reservations, radiation is now part of the white man's legacy -- a primer on what happens when the government tries to make amends for debts no man can pay.

Federal government interest in the Navajos grew during World War II.

First it courted men to be "code talkers." The Japanese, who broke nearly every U.S. radio code, never cracked spoken Navajo. Then, the government wanted uranium to make atomic bombs.

When Kerr-McGee and other corporations arrived to run the mines, no one on the reservation thought twice about taking the work. Navajo miners were paid $45 a week, a small sum even then but better than nothing.

Kerr-McGee declined to comment. "This is a subject that is under litigation," said a spokeswoman. The company is being sued for allegedly causing the deaths of two Navajo by exposing them to radiation.

Johnny Sam, now 60, worked a hopper for five years beginning in 1975, examining chunks of rock under a special light to identify high-grade uranium. The good stuff was blue. The low-grade was gray.

Most was yellow, meaning average. "Leetso" is the Navajo word for uranium. It means "yellow brown" or "yellow dirt."

"They didn't explain to us what it did to you," says Sam, his dark eyes scanning the hillsides of Church Rock, which is 17 miles northeast of Gallup, N.M., and the site of one of the biggest nuclear accidents in U.S. history.

Sam remembers foremen ordering miners into smoky shafts minutes after a TNT blast. The longest tunnels ran 1,800 feet, often with no ventilation. The men trudged in, their hats beaming shafts of light, their lungs filling with radioactive dust.

It has been 20 years since Sam wore a miner's hat. His breath comes hard now, and his lungs burn. He has never smoked cigarettes; he blames the mines.

"Nothing bothered us right away," he said. "Fifteen or 20 years later, things bother you."

Lung cancer is a torturous and humiliating way to die.

Breathing is agony. Control is lost over private things.

To his family, the swift demise of Ray Joe was stupefying. Suddenly, the sturdy bear of a man weighed less than 100 pounds and couldn't get out of bed.

"He tried to stay strong till the end," says David Joe. "But there was nothing left of him."

It started with wheezing. Ray Joe couldn't catch his breath. He found himself unable to haul well water to the house he had built with his two hands. His family took him to hospitals in Albuquerque, Gallup, and Farmington. But the cancer in his lungs was too far gone.

Six months after his diagnosis, Ray Joe died.

It was the widows who first petitioned the government in 1960 for redress. As their husbands died, they began to talk among themselves. And to notice things. Like the way death started with not being able to catch a full breath.

The wives remembered other things that seized their hearts. How they used to bring uranium chunks in the house at night so their children could watch them glow in the dark. How their husbands' work clothes, covered in radioactive muck, sometimes sat in the kitchen for a week because running water didn't come to this reservation until the 1980s.

"The government destroyed this community," said David Joe. "They destroyed our lives."

-------- oregon

Weapons Plant Workers Say Army Covered Up Gas Leaks

July 30, 2000
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/army-plant-gas.html

WASHINGTON, July 29 -- A group of workers who were overcome last year by fumes at a chemical weapons plant in Oregon is accusing the Army of covering up leaks of highly toxic nerve agents and mustard gas on the day of the incident.

Lawyers for the workers at the Umatilla Chemical Depot charge that investigators from the Army and Raytheon, a defense contractor, concealed four leaks of sarin and mustard gas that occurred just hours after 34 workers became ill on Sept. 15.

The lawyers, citing Army documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, also said chemical agents had leaked at the site 22 times during a six-day period, including the day the workers were sickened. The depot is near Hermiston, in eastern Oregon.

The Army denies that any of the workers stricken at the depot were exposed to leaks from the chemical weapons, although it has failed to identify the specific source of their illness. Inquiries by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the State of Oregon backed up the Army's conclusions.

"Either the Army and Raytheon have engaged in a deliberate attempt to hide the truth about the Umatilla poisonings or they conducted an investigation that was bungled beyond belief," said James E. McCandlish, a lawyer who is representing 18 of the workers. They plan to file a federal lawsuit on Monday against the Army and Washington Group International, Raytheon's parent company.

The commander of the Umatilla depot, Lt. Col. Tom Woloszyn, said the Mr. McCandlish was misinterpreting the data collected by a highly sensitive system designed to detect the presence of chemical agents. The lawyer is mistaking interferents -- normally occurring chemicals that can cause false readings -- glitches and tests of the system for leaks, Colonel Woloszyn said. And the readings Mr. McClandish is citing are below the levels of accurate detection, the colonel said.

"We've never had agent detected outside of the igloos themselves," he said, referring to the structures that house 3,317 tons of nerve and mustard agent, about 12 percent of the nation's stockpile.

The stricken workers were building an incinerator to destroy the weapons, as mandated by a 1995 treaty banning chemical arms. Most of the weapons stored at Umatilla were built in the 1960's, including more than 100,000 M55 rockets, and some leak due to corrosion. Since 1984, 127 rockets have been reported leaking.

The Army insists that the dangerous agents have always been swiftly detected and contained on site. But lawyers for the workers say the open ventilation systems of the storage igloos could allow for toxins to leak into the environment, which is what they assert happened on Sept. 15.

Two days after the workers were rushed to a local hospital, the Army and Raytheon ruled out exposure to the deadly agents. Three weeks after that, officials at the facility said preliminary tests indicated that fumes from construction materials -- including fiberglass floorboards, paint or wall panels -- were to blame.

"They have not been able to identify specifically what caused the workers to become ill," Mary Alice Binder, a spokeswoman, said on Friday. "However, we can say it's not the chemical agents stored at the depot."

Lawyers for the workers said the Army and Raytheon investigators had made no mention of rashes and skin irritations found on their clients, which are important indicators of exposure to mustard gas. .

Mr. McCandlish said his clients had since been found to have disorders that include reactive airway disease, which he said causes patients to gag in response to certain fumes or aromas, pulmonary problems and chronic fatigue.

Washington Group International declined to comment on behalf of Raytheon.

-------- tennessee

Nuclear Waste May Help Cancer

Associated Press
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD
07-30-00
From: Ndunlks@aol.com

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - Locked away for more than 40 years in guarded concrete vaults at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory may be the key to a promising new therapy for cancer patients.

The lab's 1 1/2-ton cache of weapons-grade uranium-233, until now considered waste, is the nation's only readily available source for a potent isotope that can kill leukemia cells without harming healthy cells.

``It is kind of like a little bomb going off that you can target right to that cancer cell,'' the lab's program manager Jim Rushton said.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York are developing the ``alpha particle immunotherapy'' and last year completed initial human tests.

The isotope bismuth-213 was attached to an antibody designed to carry the alpha-emitting isotope to the cancer. The tests were to see if the treatment did more harm than good in acute myeloid leukemia patients.

The results were a surprise. Not only was the therapy safe, but leukemia cells were eliminated in the blood stream and reduced in the bone marrow of 13 of the 18 patients taking part, said Dr. Joseph Jurcic, one of the researchers.

``We really think it has broad implications for the whole field of oncology, not just for leukemia,'' he said.

The researchers don't envision bismuth therapy replacing chemotherapy or surgery. Rather they see its potential in ``cleaning up residual cancer cells that are remaining behind after primary treatments,'' he said.

This is no small challenge. Jurcic said only 30 percent to 40 percent of acute leukemia patients are cured by chemotherapy.

``The majority of these patients go into remission with chemotherapy, but they relapse because of these residual cells. That's where we think the bismuth is going to be particularly useful.''

This fall, Sloan-Kettering, under the watch of the National Cancer Institute, plans to start a second phase of testing with 35 to 40 patients to measure the therapy's effectiveness. The trials could last three years.

``The advantage of alpha-emitters is that they deposit a large amount of energy in a very small area of tissue,'' said Dr. Jorge Carrasquillo, deputy chief of nuclear medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

Attaching the bismuth to antibodies that can carry the radiation dose straight to diseased cells is an ``innovative treatment,'' and Sloan-Kettering is leading the way, he said.

``Of course it is too early to tell the final role,'' Carrasquillo said, ``but it certainly is a strategy worth pursuing.''

The problem was getting more bismuth-213, an exotic isotope with a 46-minute half-life, which makes it perfect for injecting into patients because it quickly dissipates but makes it difficult to acquire.

Bismuth-213 can be obtained in what physicists describe as a decay chain from uranium-233. First, thorium-229 is extracted, then actinium-225 is taken from that and then the bismuth is extracted from the actinium.

The search for thorium led to the uranium-233 stockpile in Oak Ridge.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson agreed last month at the behest of Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., to double the supply of bismuth-213 by 2002 for the Sloan-Kettering research.

Rushton said only 1 percent of the available bismuth-213 has been recovered from Oak Ridge. The total of bismuth-213 there is infinitesimally small - so small that it is measured by its radioactivity instead of its weight.

A typical shipment to Sloan-Kettering ``is literally a spot of material that is dried in the bottom of a vial. It looks like the vial is empty,'' Rushton said.

But researchers believe there is enough high-powered bismuth-213 at Oak Ridge to treat up to 100,000 cancer patients a year.

Oak Ridge's uranium-233 was made at the government's weapons fuel production plants in South Carolina and Washington state in the 1950s and 1960s. However, it was never intended for bombs, rather to fuel commercial nuclear plants.

At the time, uranium sources were scarce and nuclear power generation looked full of promise.

``But nuclear power did not grow as rapidly as the too-cheap-to-meter advocates had said, and people found all kinds of uranium out there,'' Rushton said. ``The price fell and the economic need for this as an alternative fuel never developed.''

And so the uranium-233, considered more hazardous than enriched uranium for weapons - which also is stored in Oak Ridge - has remained at the Oak Ridge lab complex. It costs $15 million a year to store, and some experts estimate it will cost even more to dispose of.

Although the bismuth extraction will not reduce the volume of uranium-233, it at least gives value to the uranium's manufacture, Rushton said.

``We spent a lot of money making this stuff,'' he said. ``If we had disposed of all this 10 years ago, we wouldn't have the option to look at bismuth-213 today.''

On the Net:
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center: http://www.mskcc.org/patients-n-public/clinical-trials/index.html
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov

-------- us nuc politics

Bush Wins In the End On Platform Ideas on Education, Other Issues Survive

Washington Post
Sunday, July 30, 2000; Page A21
By Thomas B. Edsall Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-07/30/077l-073000-idx.html

PHILADELPHIA, July 29-Texas Gov. George W. Bush today beat back conservative attacks on his education and foreign policy initiatives to win approval of a Republican Party platform that generally reflects his theme of "compassionate conservatism."

The platform "is giving the party a new direction," declared Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, who heads the platform committee. "We wanted to come up with a document that we felt was visionary and uplifting; we didn't want to be part of something that was critical and pessimistic."

After setbacks in a platform subcommittee yesterday, Bush's operatives conducted a 24-hour lobbying campaign to successfully persuade the full platform committee to restore an endorsement of the broad outline of his education plan and to crush a call for the abolition of the Department of Education.

Bush "made it clear he does not want any language in the platform saying the Department of Education should be 'curtailed' or 'phased out.' He believes very strongly that education is a cornerstone of this election," said Bush spokesman Ari Fleisher.

The overall document meets most, but not all, of Bush's objectives. Unlike the 1996 platform, the 2000 statement of party policy does not call for the elimination of any federal agency or department. It endorses an active federal role in education, strongly supports legal immigration and calls for a major reduction of "horrific" nuclear weapons.

Without identifying former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) or other leaders of the 1994 Republican "revolution" by name, the preamble declares that the Republican Party under Bush will no longer be the confrontational, angry institution that steadily lost public favor during the late 1990s: "After a period of bitter division in national politics, our nominee is a leader who brings people together. In a time of fierce partisanship, he calls all citizens to common goals."

Foreign policy hawks on the platform committee lost their bid to eliminate language that they saw as failing to stress the theme of "peace through strength" and that declares "Russia is not the great enemy. . . . American security need no longer depend on the old nuclear balance of terror."

The platform did, however, contain some problematic stands for Bush, and it leaves two constituencies unhappy: abortion rights and gay rights advocates.

Republicans who support abortion rights were defeated at every turn, as conservatives, with Bush's support, held firm to traditional platform language calling for enactment of an antiabortion constitutional amendment banning the procedure, with no exceptions, and for using a stand on abortion as a litmus test in appointing federal judges.

The tough antiabortion stand goes far beyond Bush's position: He is for exceptions in the case of rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother and says he opposes litmus tests. But he agreed to the language to keep peace with the Republican right and give himself some running room to shift the platform to the left in other areas.

Gays experienced a more direct assault, with the repeated inclusion of language reflecting Republican opposition to "the gay lifestyle" and to the presence of homosexuals in the military. The delegates were so concerned about any indication of support for homosexuality that they amended a provision endorsing two-parent families with "fathers and mothers" to say "a father and a mother" to be sure to avoid any implied endorsement of gay parents with two fathers or two mothers.

The language against gays in the military also goes further than Bush's position, which supports the "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

The platform committee members also went well beyond Bush's stands by calling for an end to the practice in the Army, Navy and Air Force of conducting co-ed basic training. The Marines separate the sexes during basic training.

The central development in the two-day process of turning a proposed draft platform into the document that will go to the full convention on Monday was Bush's education victory today.

Sen. Bill Frist (Tenn.), a Bush ally and co-chair of the platform committee, won approval to list the major elements of Bush's education program, including modified vouchers, expanded charter schools, increased school choice and the cutoff of federal funds to poorly performing schools.

"There is no more important thing that we can do in this committee than to support the centerpiece of his [Bush's] campaign," said committee member Chris Georgacas of Minnesota. "It's the reason he is 11 percentage points ahead of Vice President Gore."

When conservatives attempted to call for elimination of the Department of Education, they ran head on into the Bush machine. "When you say abolishment of the Department of Education," warned Frist, "when you use those words, people forget the 'Department of' and it becomes abolish education."

The Democratic Platform Committee, meeting in Cleveland, approved a centrist document crediting Gore for much of the economic boom of the last eight years. The committee easily rejected attempts by liberals to attack administration trade policy and to call for a larger health initiative than Gore has endorsed.

----

Cohen May OK Missile Defense System

July 30, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Missile-Defense-Cohen.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Judging by recent comments, Defense Secretary William Cohen appears to be leaning toward a recommendation that President Clinton take the first step toward deploying a national missile defense system.

There is little doubt Cohen believes a shield can be built; the issue may come down to cost and timing.

Cohen is likely to take another week or two to consider many complex aspects of this decision, from the urgency of a missile threat to whether an anti-missile shield is affordable.

``I frankly think that if you had an ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) that landed in New York or Washington or San Francisco, Los Angeles or Tampa, the damage would be catastrophic, and the amount of money ... would be rather insignificant,'' Cohen said July 6.

The proposed missile defense system is projected to cost $60 billion.

As recently as Wednesday, in remarks to reporters in his Pentagon office, Cohen said he had not made up his mind what to recommend.

His advice will be an important factor in Clinton's decision, but the president also will take into account views of the rest of his national security team, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Cohen has noted that even though Clinton must decide whether to start the deployment process, his successor will be able to stop it, modify the plan or take an altogether different approach.

The initial construction work on an X-band radar in Alaska cannot begin before summer 2001.

The question for Clinton is whether to give the Pentagon the go-ahead to award construction contracts to let site preparation begin next year. If Clinton decides not to go forward, he will have eliminated the possibility of having a national missile defense ready by 2005, as now planned.

Whether that target remains realistic would seem the first question Cohen must consider.

His recent comments give indications of doubt. In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cohen noted the failure of the past two flight tests of the ``smart rock,'' or missile interceptor, that is being developed to shoot down incoming warheads.

``Perhaps it has called into question the realism of the date,'' Cohen said. But he added he considers 2005 the target ``we ought to continue to focus on'' in order to keep the work -- both the testing and construction of the anti-missile system -- moving as fast as possible.

Even if Cohen were to determine that 2006 or 2007 is a more reasonable target date, he might want to proceed immediately with the first phase of construction in Alaska to lengthen the odds of meeting that timetable.

The weather on Shemya Island, in Alaska's Aleutian chain, where the Pentagon plans to build the powerful new radar, is so foul that construction is possible only a few weeks each summer. The radar is needed to help the missile interceptors find their targets and to distinguish decoys.

Cohen said Wednesday that Gen. Larry Welch, head of a panel of experts advising the Pentagon on the missile defense project, has said Shemya's weather might unavoidably delay construction past 2005.

During the 18 months since he altered the 2003 target deployment year to 2005, Cohen often has said he believes a national missile defense is justified by an emerging threat of attack by North Korea or possibly Iran or Iraq. The urgency of the threat is among Clinton's principal considerations.

``There is a threat, and the threat is growing,'' Cohen said on Jan. 20, 1999.

Clinton seems to share that view.

``Is there a threat which is new and different?'' Clinton asked at a May 31 news conference in Lisbon, Portugal. ``The answer to that, it seems to me, is plainly, yes, there is, and there will be one.''

Another major factor in Cohen's decision is the technical feasibility of the missile defense system under development. Many critics in Congress and elsewhere contend it cannot be made to work reliably.

Cohen believes it can.

``We believe that the testing to date demonstrates the validity that we are close to having a technology that can, in fact, defeat a few dozen missiles fired by a rogue state, and that's the criterion that I will look at,'' he said June 12. That was before the latest test failure, July 7, the second consecutive setback.

In his testimony Tuesday, Cohen acknowledged that the two failures leave in doubt the feasibility question. He quickly added: ``I believe that the trend is such that these are problems that are correctable.''

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Robert Burns covers military issues for The Associated Press.
On the Net: Ballistic Missile Defense Organization: http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/nmd.html

-------- us nuc waste

Nuclear Waste May Help Cancer

July 30, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-EXP-Cancer-Isotope.html

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- Locked away for more than 40 years in guarded concrete vaults at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory may be the key to a promising new therapy for cancer patients.

The lab's 1 1/2-ton cache of weapons-grade uranium-233, until now considered waste, is the nation's only readily available source for a potent isotope that can kill leukemia cells without harming healthy cells.

``It is kind of like a little bomb going off that you can target right to that cancer cell,'' the lab's program manager Jim Rushton said.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York are developing the ``alpha particle immunotherapy'' and last year completed initial human tests.

The isotope bismuth-213 was attached to an antibody designed to carry the alpha-emitting isotope to the cancer. The tests were to see if the treatment did more harm than good in acute myeloid leukemia patients.

The results were a surprise. Not only was the therapy safe, but leukemia cells were eliminated in the blood stream and reduced in the bone marrow of 13 of the 18 patients taking part, said Dr. Joseph Jurcic, one of the researchers.

``We really think it has broad implications for the whole field of oncology, not just for leukemia,'' he said.

The researchers don't envision bismuth therapy replacing chemotherapy or surgery. Rather they see its potential in ``cleaning up residual cancer cells that are remaining behind after primary treatments,'' he said.

This is no small challenge. Jurcic said only 30 percent to 40 percent of acute leukemia patients are cured by chemotherapy.

``The majority of these patients go into remission with chemotherapy, but they relapse because of these residual cells. That's where we think the bismuth is going to be particularly useful.''

This fall, Sloan-Kettering, under the watch of the National Cancer Institute, plans to start a second phase of testing with 35 to 40 patients to measure the therapy's effectiveness. The trials could last three years.

``The advantage of alpha-emitters is that they deposit a large amount of energy in a very small area of tissue,'' said Dr. Jorge Carrasquillo, deputy chief of nuclear medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

Attaching the bismuth to antibodies that can carry the radiation dose straight to diseased cells is an ``innovative treatment,'' and Sloan-Kettering is leading the way, he said.

``Of course it is too early to tell the final role,'' Carrasquillo said, ``but it certainly is a strategy worth pursuing.''

The problem was getting more bismuth-213, an exotic isotope with a 46-minute half-life, which makes it perfect for injecting into patients because it quickly dissipates but makes it difficult to acquire.

Bismuth-213 can be obtained in what physicists describe as a decay chain from uranium-233. First, thorium-229 is extracted, then actinium-225 is taken from that and then the bismuth is extracted from the actinium.

The search for thorium led to the uranium-233 stockpile in Oak Ridge.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson agreed last month at the behest of Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., to double the supply of bismuth-213 by 2002 for the Sloan-Kettering research.

Rushton said only 1 percent of the available bismuth-213 has been recovered from Oak Ridge. The total of bismuth-213 there is infinitesimally small -- so small that it is measured by its radioactivity instead of its weight.

A typical shipment to Sloan-Kettering ``is literally a spot of material that is dried in the bottom of a vial. It looks like the vial is empty,'' Rushton said.

But researchers believe there is enough high-powered bismuth-213 at Oak Ridge to treat up to 100,000 cancer patients a year.

Oak Ridge's uranium-233 was made at the government's weapons fuel production plants in South Carolina and Washington state in the 1950s and 1960s. However, it was never intended for bombs, rather to fuel commercial nuclear plants.

At the time, uranium sources were scarce and nuclear power generation looked full of promise.

``But nuclear power did not grow as rapidly as the too-cheap-to-meter advocates had said, and people found all kinds of uranium out there,'' Rushton said. ``The price fell and the economic need for this as an alternative fuel never developed.''

And so the uranium-233, considered more hazardous than enriched uranium for weapons -- which also is stored in Oak Ridge -- has remained at the Oak Ridge lab complex. It costs $15 million a year to store, and some experts estimate it will cost even more to dispose of.

Although the bismuth extraction will not reduce the volume of uranium-233, it at least gives value to the uranium's manufacture, Rushton said.

``We spent a lot of money making this stuff,'' he said. ``If we had disposed of all this 10 years ago, we wouldn't have the option to look at bismuth-213 today.''

-------- MILITARY (by country)

-------- arms sales

Arms Race Shaping Up Between American and European Firms

By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 30, 2000 ; A06
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4089-2000Jul29.html

FARNBOROUGH, England -- As an $80 million Eurofighter military jet ripped into a steep climb over the crowd at the international air show here, the roar of its afterburners was an assault on more than just eardrums.

The consortium of European companies building the plane hopes it will knock off the American F-15 and F-16 jets as a preferred fighter for military forces around the world. Again and again during the week-long exhibition, Europeans showed off new weaponry that takes aim at systems being produced by U.S. companies.

A decade after the end of the Cold War, an arms race is shaping up among the traditional allies of the West. National priorities are prompting this battle to grab the largest possible share of dwindling worldwide weapons budgets. Some high-level government and industry officials warn that the competition could drive a wedge in transatlantic relations and undermine the ability of NATO allies to fight alongside each other in conflicts such as the Kosovo intervention.

At the same time, economic realities are pushing in the opposite direction: That there is only enough work to sustain a few strong companies promotes multinational cooperation and industry mergers.

Where these contrary tidal forces will lead is a high-stakes question involving billions of dollars and the world's most sophisticated military technologies.

"We are at a crossroads," said John Weston, chairman of Britain's BAE Systems.

Weston's company, formed last year by the merger of British Aerospace and GEC Marconi, is one of two new European titans that made their Farnborough debut this week. The other is the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., or EADS, formed by the mergers of top companies in Germany, France and Spain.

The rapid European consolidation leaves two companies equivalent in size to American giants Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Raytheon Co.

U.S. officials applaud the effort to combine and become more efficient but worry about an accompanying drive to "buy European."

"If we let a Fortress Europe develop--which I can see happening--we'll have a Fortress America. With no interoperability, the warfighting capability goes down," David Oliver Jr., principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and technology, said in an interview.

Weston is convinced that the impetus toward defense industry cooperation will win out over nationalism. Within the next 10 years, he said, there will be only two or three major defense companies in the world, all multinational.

He has already shaped BAE Systems in that fashion. It does more defense work in the United States than in Britain, has a hand in two-thirds of the contracts belonging to the continental EADS and has a significant presence in Asia and the Middle East.

Earlier this month, Weston set out to test U.S. willingness to allow foreign investment in its defense industry by announcing plans to buy the military electronics unit of Lockheed Martin for $1.67 billion.

That business contains some of the military's most sensitive technology, including electronic defenses used aboard the high-tech F-22 fighter jet.

Congress's reaction remains to be seen. But to executives at EADS, news of the deal was greeted with dismay.

The company had teamed with L-3 Communications Corp. of New York to make a bid for the Lockheed Martin electronics business. Its failure was seen as confirmation that while the British enjoy special status in U.S. military affairs, the Pentagon does not yet hold continental Europe in the same regard.

"There's a danger that we're seeing a fault line developing now between the U.S. and Great Britain on the one hand and the rest of continental Europe on the other," said Manfred von Nordheim, president of EADS in North America. "It would be disastrous for Europe and also for U.S.-continental European relations if the perception would solidify that the U.S. will only accept British companies in transatlantic deals. It would have consequences that would reverberate."

Nowhere was that potential fault line more evident than at the EADS exhibition hall at the Farnborough Air Show. One word stood out: "European." Airbus jetliners converted to military use were touted as "the European solution to airlift needs."

A model of a space shuttle-like craft showed "future European reusable launch vehicles." The proposed Galileo network of navigation satellites would provide "European sovereignty in future traffic management and telemetrics infrastructure."

Von Nordheim said that in many cases, U.S. practice has driven Europeans to strike out on their own.

"One of the reasons why there is a drive in Europe to buy European goods is because the United States isn't buying any European. . . . 'If you don't buy from me, I won't buy from you.' I think it's unfortunate," he said.

The conflict in Kosovo highlighted the problem of allies lacking equipment that can work together. Forces were often unable to communicate because there was no standard, secure communications system. In one instance that Oliver likes to cite, Italian fliers asked U.S. forces to supply them with a special flare that has been exported to 30 countries. But Italy was not one of the nations that had sought export clearance for the flare, so the fliers' requests were denied.

"They're going to save other Americans from being killed, and we have a group of people thwarting national objectives and sending a pretty powerful message that we're not an ally that can be relied upon," Oliver said.

U.S. companies point out that it's not always U.S. policy that's to blame for restricting the flow of goods. European countries must become more open to American industry as well, said Scott A. Harris, vice president for plans and analysis at Lockheed Martin.

"Are they going to be prepared to permit open competition in this marketplace? Unless the whole transatlantic field is leveled, there's a crisis looming," Harris said, pointing out that everyone wants access to the U.S. defense market because, at $60 billion a year for weapons, it is twice as large as that of all other NATO members combined.

Harris said he worries that allied governments will squander scarce research and development money on weapons systems that simply compete with instead of augment each other, such as building a new warplane when Lockheed Martin has already leaped ahead with its F-22.

"I mean, look at the Eurofighter down here," he said, gesturing to the airfield at Farnborough. "Who wants to pay $80 million a copy for technology that's a generation old?"

The European reaction is hard to decipher at this point.

On Thursday, the defense ministers from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden gathered here to sign a treaty standardizing policy for their defense industries and promoting the "harmonization of military requirements."

"This reflects our determination to maintain a strong and competitive defense industrial base capable of competing with the best in the world," British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon said.

The move could signal a circling of European wagons to resist U.S. competition. But Weston argues that European nations have to band together because their individual defense markets are too small. The result will be an opportunity for healthy competition and cooperation with the United States.

Competition does not necessarily mean that industries in Europe and the United States will wind up working against one another, said Pierre Chao, a defense analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston.

"Fortress Europe does not exist yet, and the reason why everyone is making so much noise about it is to make sure it doesn't develop," Chao said.

-------- russia

Sea Launch Venture Has a Success After 'Adversity'

Associated Press
Sunday, July 30, 2000 ; A06
The Washington Post
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4071-2000Jul29.html

LONG BEACH, Calif., July 29 -- A Russian-Ukrainian rocket blasted off from a floating platform in the Pacific in the Sea Launch venture's first mission since a $100 million satellite was destroyed.

The Zenit-3SL rocket took off on schedule Friday from a converted oil rig about 1,400 miles southeast of Hawaii.

"The big news here is that Sea Launch is back," said Will Trafton, president of the venture that includes partners from Russia, Ukraine and the United States.

Mission controllers cheered at the company's home port in Long Beach and on a command ship near the floating launch platform.

The international consortium's last launch ended minutes after liftoff March 12 when a second-stage valve failed to close. The ICO Global Communications satellite was destroyed.

"We've been through some adversity here lately, but we're a stronger company, a stronger team for it," Trafton said.

On Friday, Sea Launch's rocket lofted PanAmSat Corp.'s PAS-9 communications satellite into an elliptical transfer orbit. Once at an altitude of 23,500 miles, its coverage range will extend from California to the Falkland Islands and across the Atlantic to Berlin.

Launches at the equator allow a rocket to carry more weight to a higher orbit than from other latitudes. And because the platform is surrounded by the ocean, there is little chance of anything falling on populated areas.

Sea Launch's command ship and platform will trek 3,000 miles back to home port and prepare for the launch of a communications satellite in September.

-------- u.s.

Pentagon Assailed for a Philadelphia Display

July 30, 2000
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/073000wh-gop-pentagon.html

WASHINGTON, July 29 -- Republicans in Congress have long chided their Democratic colleagues for ignoring shortfalls in the defense budgets, but the Pentagon's decision to send a display of some of the military's latest hardware to the Republican National Convention gave the Democrats a golden opportunity to turn the tables.

Two Democratic congressmen sharply criticized the Pentagon's decision to send an array of weapons and other equipment to the former Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for a three-day exhibition that begins today, saying the money would be better spent on repairs or benefits for service members and their families.

Despite the Pentagon's policy barring the military from involvement in partisan political activities, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen approved a request to ship the weapons -- at taxpayers' expense -- to the shipyard, where about 100 Republican members of Congress are staying during the convention.

Pentagon officials said they could not yet estimate the cost of moving all the equipment to Philadelphia, though the Air Force estimated that its share would be at least $100,000.

In a pointed letter to Mr. Cohen on Friday evening, Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, dismissed the Pentagon's arguments that the display did not represent a partisan event.

"While I recognize that the department has attempted to make sure that its activities in Philadelphia will not be interpreted as associating the department with any partisan political causes, issues or activities, this will be, frankly, a difficult distinction for many people to make," Mr. Skelton wrote. "There is no event in American politics more partisan than a national political convention."

The criticism, echoed by Representative Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii in an interview, came too late to have any effect on the display, which will remain at the shipyard until Monday as a centerpiece of a series of events there, including a fund-raiser by Representative Curt Weldon, a Republican who represents suburban Philadelphia and who requested the hardware show.

But the Democrats criticized the decision to send the matériel, and more than 150 service members, and attacked their Republican colleagues for ignoring more pressing needs. Their criticisms were echoed by some service officials, including one senior officer who referred to the display as "the Philadelphia fiasco."

Mr. Cohen defended his decision to sidestep the Pentagon's strict policy against military involvement in political activities, saying that the display was not, literally, at the convention. He also said two Philadelphia Democrats, Representative Robert A. Brady and Mayor John F. Street, supported Mr. Weldon's request.

"We're very proud of the men and women who are serving us and the equipment that they use, and we're not hesitant about showing it to general members of the public, as well as people who are attending the convention," Mr. Cohen said on Friday.

The display at the shipyard is not scheduled to be open to the public.

Mr. Cohen also extended an invitation to the Democrats to play host to a similar display at their convention in Los Angeles next month, but Mr. Skelton and Mr. Abercrombie dismissed that, saying they would not support such a request. "It's open to misinterpretation and gives the appearance of impropriety," he said.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Nature's Hostile Takeover?
From Weeds to Bees, Invasive Species Alarm Ecologists

Washington Post
Sunday, July 30, 2000; Page A01
By Joel Achenbach Washington Post Staff Writer
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-07/30/111l-073000-idx.html

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.-Cruising westward at 300 feet, the helicopter is heading straight for the end of civilization. You can see it just ahead. It's a line across the surface of the Earth--a levee, built years ago to hold back the swamp. Now it works in reverse, restraining the developers. Beyond the levee there are no shopping malls, no houses, no roads, just a wet prairie full of alligators, lily pads and saw grass.

And there's something new, something growing, spreading--a pale-green substance that seems to be crawling all over the tree islands that speckle this portion of the Everglades. The pilot takes the chopper down for a closer look. You can see it, sure enough: lygodium. Old World climbing fern.

It has gone berserk. It's like the Blob. The islands are caving in at the center, crushed by the dense, matted blanket of vegetation. The willows, the hollies, the cabbage palms--they're being buried alive.

"You wouldn't see any of this three years ago," testifies the chopper pilot, Jim Dunn.

David Viker, deputy manager of the federally managed swamp, says, "It looks like a green bomb went off."

What exactly is this virulent organism? It's a houseplant. In the right context, it's a lovely little fern.

Lygodium is the classic invasive species: an organism that's been transported by human beings to habitats where it has no natural enemies. The counterattack against this intruder is just one isolated battle in what is becoming a major war from the Everglades to Rock Creek Park, from Hawaii to your own back yard. The scale of the conflict is planetary.

There are bombs detonating everywhere.

The Multifarious Menace There have always been invasive species, but ecologists and government officials say the situation has become riotous. One recent study estimated that exotic species, including diseases, cost the nation more than $130 billion a year. There is an emerging sentiment that this could be the next great environmental crisis, that without serious countermeasures we will find ourselves living in what the nature writer David Quammen has called the "Planet of Weeds."

Last year President Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to address the problem of invasives. The order created a new entity called the Invasive Species Council. The council's executive director takes office tomorrow. But for all the bureaucratic sparks, there are no platoons of weed-whacking commandos taking to the hills with machetes.

For the general public the issue remains relatively obscure. People grasp the dangers posed by bulldozers and acid rain. It's not as easy to understand the menace of, say, Eurasian milfoil.

The issue also suffers from its scattered nature. The invaders range from bacteria to vines to feral pigs. Broadly defined, invasive species come from every kingdom of life. A few examples:

* Domestic honeybees are under attack from the invasive Varroa mite and from aggressive "killer" bees that have arrived from South America.

* West Nile virus, blamed for seven deaths last year, has reappeared among birds and mosquitoes in New York. Central Park was closed one night this past week to allow aerial spraying of pesticide.

* The Asian tiger mosquito arrived in the United States in the mid-1980s and now plagues the Washington area. It bites all day long.

* The fabled sagebrush of Nevada is being replaced by cheat grass, an invader from Europe that is explosively flammable.

* Miconia, a plant with razor-edged leaves, has arrived in Hawaii and formed impenetrable stands over thousands of acres.

* More than 5,000 prize maple trees in New York and Chicago have been cut down after infestations by the Asian longhorn beetle.

* The Asian swamp eel has turned up in canals in South Florida and may soon start devouring small fish in the Everglades.

The invaders are characterized not so much by their exotic origins as by their virulent behavior, the way they overrun natural defenses. They are, by nature, insidious. When they get loose, they tend to have perfect camouflage. Weeds are green.

Invasive species have been pestering America for more than a century. Starlings from Europe were released in Central Park in the late 1800s by a Shakespeare fan who wanted to introduce to America the birds mentioned in the plays. The great American chestnut tree was wiped out by an Asian fungus first detected in New York in 1904.

What's new is the scale and pace of the invasion. Global economic trade has put life in a blender. Sometimes the mode of transportation is the ballast water of a ship that has crossed the ocean and plied the St. Lawrence River to Lake Ontario. Sometimes it might be the treads of a hiker's boot, the perfect slot for an exotic seed. Living things are opportunistic. The ancient barriers--oceans, rivers, mountain ranges--have been breached.

Life is flying around everywhere.

The Next Extinction

"The blending of the natural world into one great monoculture of the most aggressive species is, I think, a blow to the spirit and beauty of the natural world."

The grim assessment came from Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt as he walked one morning near the Potomac River, not far from his home in Northwest Washington. The Potomac gorge is crawling with invasive vines and weeds--stuff like porcelain berry and mile-a-minute weed. Babbitt may have incited chuckles when he warned last year of the dangers of purple loosestrife, but he's dead serious.

"There's a brand-new one coming up from Mexico called buffel grass," he said, navigating a trail along a creek near Fletcher's Boathouse. "It is now crossing the border into the Sonoran Desert. It carries fire wonderfully. They're actually pulling it up by hand in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument."

The buffel grass invasion could doom the saguaro cactus, the great emblem of the Sonoran Desert. Over time, the distinct desert environments of North America could look more and more alike. Repeat that situation all over the planet and you have a recipe for a homogenized world.

Bill Gregg, a U.S. Geological Survey plant ecologist, likens the disappearance of native species to lost knowledge: "We're burning the library, slowly," he says.

Gregg says the issue of invasives began to heat up in the 1980s, when the population of zebra mussels exploded in the Great Lakes and clogged industrial intake pipes. Other explosions followed. Asian longhorn beetles began arriving as stowaways in wooden crates from China. The link between invasives and economic globalization became obvious. Gregg points out that China and the United States have similar climates and geography, and could easily provide each other with a tremendous supply of weeds and pests.

However bad the problem is now, everyone expects it to get worse. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson argues that invasives will cause more extinctions than ordinary pollution. Robert F. Doren, a science administrator with the National Park Service, doesn't hesitate to sound the alarm: "Because of the breakdown of ecological barriers, we are now entering the sixth great extinction in the history of the planet."

The extinction problem is most severe on islands, such as Hawaii, home to dozens of endangered birds and plants. Hawaiian officials guard night and day against the arrival of the brown tree snake, which might sneak aboard military flights from Guam.

The snake arrived in Guam several decades ago and has wiped out almost all of the birds on the island. It routinely climbs power lines and triggers electrical blackouts. It has a history of biting children in their sleep.

Backyard Invaders

For the Weed Warriors, invasives are not an esoteric matter. The Weed Warriors are people like Carole Bergmann, Jayne Hench, Michelle Grace and Claudia Donegan, who live in Montgomery County and regularly attack the monstrous vines along Sligo Creek. They sense that the issue is finally getting traction.

"Citizens just started calling, unsolicited, saying something is taking over the forest in our parks," says Hench, a supervisor with the county parks department.

The weed patrol has found numerous tall trees completely smothered, humbled by a rampaging invader called porcelain berry. "It's like a bad horror movie," says Grace.

Most noxious weeds were once desired for a specific function. Tens of millions of kudzu seedlings were planted by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Kudzu fought erosion. Now it's the prototypical gone-crazy weed. Multiflora rose was planted decades ago as a kind of living barbed-wire; now farmers have to bulldoze it out of their fields.

You could find plenty of invaders in your back yard: dandelions, garlic mustard, Japanese honeysuckle, Oriental bittersweet. The economists who study the cost of invasive species don't include the hours people spend on hands and knees yanking weeds from their gardens. English ivy is another invader: It looks great on an old brick building, but turn your back and it scampers into the woods.

Jil Swearingen, a National Park Service biologist, is tracking a long list of Washington area invaders, including common mugwort, smooth bromegrass, paper mulberry, Asiatic sand sedge, spotted knapweed, sticky chickweed, celandine, field bindweed, hound's-tongue, jimson weed, Chinese yam, Indian strawberry, viper's bugloss, lesser stitchwort, and so on.

Some of these pose no serious threat. Others could be time bombs. Bill Gregg says that if you detect an invader early enough, you can remove it mechanically, by force. Wait too long and you have to attack it with chemicals, hardly the most environmentally friendly solution.

"I think metastatic cancer is the strongest analogy," he says.

The Weed Skeptic

Mark Sagoff is the naysayer.

"One man's weed or pest is another man's palm tree," he says.

Sagoff is a professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and he demands deeper thinking about the war against weeds. He points out that native species can run amok, too, like the wild grape that grows in his own back yard. Deer, too, are native, and increasingly an urban pest.

"No one has shown that exotics are more likely than natives to be harmful," Sagoff wrote recently.

He says there's no such thing as the "balance of nature." Ecosystems change. There's no single way an ecosystem "ought" to be. Sagoff argues that the fight against invasive species sometimes echoes the anti-immigrant rhetoric of America's past. Invasives are accused of "sexual robustness, excessive breeding, low parental involvement with the young, a preference for degraded conditions and so on," Sagoff wrote.

But he isn't completely complacent. He acknowledges that historically significant ecosystems are being altered, and says there may be legitimate aesthetic reasons to object to the change, in the same way that the French might protest the opening of a new McDonald's.

Ecologists say Sagoff's view of invasives doesn't take sufficient account of the rate of change. "People sometimes say this is just speeded up evolution. That's not the case," says Gordon Brown, who works on invasives for the Interior Department. "It's too accelerated."

Tim Flynn, a Hawaiian botanist, points out that Hawaii is so isolated that for most of its history a new species arrived only once every 10,000 years or so. A seabird, having miraculously survived the journey across thousands of miles of ocean, might show up with a seed in its guts. "It has to be a constipated bird," Flynn said.

'Urban Safari'

A few invaders do have fangs, which is what keeps Todd Hardwick busy in South Florida. He drives a pickup with the words "Pesky Critters" on the side. He's the guy to call when you find a reptile in your swimming pool.

"Basically I capture animals from all over the world without ever leaving South Florida. Every day is an urban safari," he says, showing off what amounts to a private zoo in his back yard. He's got rheas, emus, iguanas, an Asian muttjack, and lots of snakes. A foghorn sound fills the air. That's from one of the rheas, an ostrichlike creature. It wants to mate.

"That's an Asian water monitor," he says, pointing to a caged lizard. "Six feet long, 50 pounds, cold-blooded predatory reptile. This thing rips, shakes and tears its prey apart."

Hardwick says there are 5,000 invasive primates on the loose in South Florida. He thinks the capuchin monkeys may be forming troops in the wild.

International traffic in exotic creatures grows every year. Prices are coming down. At one pet shop in Broward County recently the boa constrictors, normally $119, were on sale for $99. A python was only $59. An iguana: $11. "Great gift idea," a sign on the cage said.

Most of these creatures arrive at Miami International Airport. On a typical day recently the arrivals included scorpions, lizards, chameleons, tree frogs, king snakes and basilisks. "We're the hotbed for venomous reptiles," said Mike Barandiaran, a wildlife inspector for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

He was looking over an Air Canada shipment, making sure it didn't contain anything illegal. You can't import a Nile crocodile, for example, though he's seen people try. "They're used to feeding on large mammals in Africa," he said, "so a human being is not a big deal."

Barandiaran's method of inspection requires rapid peeking--he'll open the top of a sack ever so slightly even as some crazed lizard tries to poke its head out. Sometimes he uses a tube to look inside. Snakes are the least of his problems. The small mammals bite.

There are 12,000 shipments of animals a year here. There are eight inspectors.

In his office Barandiaran has a box with a foot-long caiman that arrived without proper papers. A caiman is similar to an alligator, and when small is prized as a pet. "That caiman will be six feet, possibly 10 feet, long," Barandiaran said. When the creature gets large and nasty, owners get spooked, and in many cases toss their pet into a canal.

The result: A colony of caimans is breeding near the Turkey Point nuclear power plant.

Florida Showdown

One day this spring the citrus canker invasion of South Florida almost led to gunfire. The canker, a fungus, has blighted thousands of acres of lime trees. The government has ordered the destruction of every lime tree within 1,900 feet of a known infestation.

An obstinate Broward County man, pushing 90, didn't want to go along. He had several favorite lime trees in his yard. When the feds came he got his shotgun and prepared to fire. That brought a swarm of cops. At gunpoint the old man dropped his weapon and gave up the battle. His trees were burned.

South Florida, lacking a killer freeze, is particularly susceptible to biological pollution. The Brazilian pepper has completely covered two large areas in the middle of Everglades National Park. The only way to get rid of it is to bulldoze everything, scrape away the limestone bedrock and cart it all away in trucks.

Melaleuca is probably the most hated invader, an ornamental tree that long ago escaped into the Everglades. It forms impenetrably dense stands that can only be knocked back with heavy doses of herbicide. The worst thing you can do is try to burn it. The leaves contain a highly flammable oil, and when a stand burns, the intense heat wipes out every other form of life nearby. The tree, meanwhile, emits millions of seeds, which take root all through the fire zone. The ultimate irony is that, in its native Australia, the melaleuca is an endangered species.

Lygodium, originally sold in nurseries, may turn out to be more diabolical than melaleuca. Its tiny spores can fly for miles in a windstorm. The oldest patches are in southern Martin County, where it pillars up from the forest floor, riding cypress trees to the sky. Dead, whitened tree trunks poke through the flourishing lygodium like skeletal fingers. The weed gradually drifted west and hopped the levee into the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, where it has proliferated only in the last decade. Aerial surveys revealed 39,000 acres in South Florida infested with lygodium in 1997. By 1999, the figure had risen to 100,000 acres.

The antidote may be yet another exotic species, an Australian moth that feeds on the fern. Biologists are still studying the moth to make sure it won't go berserk itself.

In the meantime, refuge managers attack lygodium with herbicide and machetes. At one point the refuge officials hired some college students to hack away at the fern, but their thrill at having an outdoorsy summer job vanished quickly in the steam of the swamp.

"They lasted about a week," said Mark Museus, the refuge manager. "They didn't want to work in 90-degree weather up to their chests in water with snakes and alligators all around."

Slippery Eels

Heavy rains flooded a plant nursery near the boundary of Everglades National Park last fall. When the waters receded, workers sloshed their way through the nursery, trying to clean up. Then they felt something around their ankles and boots. Something slithering. The creatures were tubular and moved like serpents.

Asian swamp eels.

Bill Loftus, a government biologist, says they were probably dumped in canals by Asian immigrants who wanted to create a food source. But the eels don't stay in one place. They don't even have to stick to water--they can wriggle across a moist road.

"This guy can burrow right into the muck and survive there," Loftus said.

He was standing by an eel-infested canal that runs westward toward the park. Loftus worries that if the eels get into the Everglades, they'll eat shrimp and small fish, and disrupt the food supply of migratory birds.

But maybe they won't.

"Ecology is sort of an inexact science," he said.

The Great Experiment

The world is a laboratory, and this experiment has little scientific supervision. No one can keep track of all the variables, all the new inputs, the stuff dropping unexpectedly through the skylight and into the bubbling vat of life.

"It's an irreversible experiment. That's the problem. With no control," says Loftus.

Tim Flynn, the Hawaiian biologist, finds it hard to be optimistic: "Sometimes it almost feels like a lost cause."

Among the newest invaders in America is an aquatic fern called giant salvina. It has been found in nine states from Florida to the far West. It grows on the surface of lakes and ponds and can form mats three feet thick.

"It will kill everything beneath it," says biologist Randy Westbrooks. "It's bad news. Bad news."

And in early July the federal government said it had found an invasive algae, Caulerpa taxifolia, among eel grass in waters off the coast of Southern California. The algae is toxic to sea life. It ruined thousands of acres of underwater habitat in the Mediterranean Sea in the 1980s.

Where did it come from? Aquariums. The algae looks good in a fish tank. Officials suspect that it mutated after exposure to ultraviolet aquarium lights.

-------- spying

Mossad Turns to Want Ads for Spies

July 30, 2000
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Israel-Seeking-Spies.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Mossad is looking for a few good spies.

Rattled by a recent series of high-profile bungles, Israel's fabled intelligence agency plans for the first time to openly advertise for help in Israeli newspapers.

As a new generation of Israelis comes of age in an era of a booming high-tech economy and opportunity, the Mossad finds it must alter its traditional methods of recruitment.

In the Mossad ad, previewed Sunday in Israeli newspapers, heavy blue doors emblazoned with the state insignia of the Menorah, a seven-branch candelabra, open over the words, ``The Mossad is Opening Up.''

``Only you, in your heart of hearts, know that you are capable of much more, to think differently, to do more than you thought you could,'' the ad says. ``We offer you a future and a horizon of service in a field in which you will be able to contribute to what is dearest to all of us.''

Going public like this may seem an anathema to the previous generation of tightlipped spymasters, for whom secrecy and national duty went hand in hand.

Former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit said it was hard to him to get used to the idea of launching a public recruitment campaign. Previously, the agency used vague and anonymous want ads. But he acknowledged that present-day realities had left the agency no other choice.

``The differences between today's youth and youth in the past is that in the past, we saw ourselves as people committed to the norms and values of (national) service, of Zionism,'' Shavit told Israel radio. ``Today's youth are motivated primarily -- and I think it is positive -- by a sense of individual accomplishment.''

While the vast majority of young Israeli men still do three years of compulsory army service and young women serve just under two years, a growing number seek to avoid the draft.

Shavit bemoaned what he described as a growing lack of respect for the country's security institutions, including the army, in a society increasingly concerned with material success.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak's office, which oversees the elite spy agency known worldwide for its bold missions, issued a statement acknowledging that the lure of the high-tech and business worlds had put a crunch on Mossad's ability to continue its tradition of recruiting the best and brightest.

``In order to compete in the employment market for the few outstanding people suited for the Mossad, the Mossad realized it should reach out to the target population using the modern language of the world of mass media,'' the statement said. The ad, directed at both men and women, also appears on the prime minister's office Web site.

The prime minister's office noted that other top intelligence agencies such as the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's M15 have already started such recruitment campaigns.

In addition to advertising in the media, personal letters will be sent to potentially suitable candidates, the statement said.

Shavit said the Mossad had to keep up with changes in Israel's society, changes which perhaps foreshadow a time when peace will make national security concerns less important.

``We want to make it (the Mossad) compatible to a new era of negotiations, of peace efforts and coexistence with our enemies and maybe even ultimately an era of genuine peace,'' Shavit said.

-------- activists

"War No More" Peace Convergence in Philadelphia on Sunday, July 30.

From: "SOA Watch" soawatch@knight-hub.com

In solidarity with many other national and regional sponsors, there will be giant (30 foot) puppets, and incredible music by "Sing It Down"(who is also performing on the main stage). With us will be Fr. Roy Bourgeois (founder of SOA Watch), Philadelphia City Councilman Angel Ortiz (he sponsored the Philadelphia City Council Resolution to close the SOA), and many others who will carry crosses, coffins and banners, and who will be wearing masks as part of the march, and street theater in a dramatic and artistic expression of the suffering and hope of the people of Latin America.

Many are needed to help us in our

preparations on Wednesday, July 26 ~ 6 PM - 10 PM (in Philly) to make puppets (no prior experience is necessary); to be part of the street theater and to assist us in leafleting throughout the day. Please email, or phone us if you are able to help out on either day (215) 473-2162 or (215) 477-5892. In addition, to date the following organizations have sponsored the "War No More" Peace Convergence: 50 Years is Enough, Alliance for Global Justice, Amnesty International (Group 112), Call to Action, Campaign for Labor Right, Cleveland Inter-Religious Task Force, Committee for Inter-American Human Rights, Ecumenical Program on Central America & the Caribbean (EPICA), Green Street Friends, Guatemala Solidarity Network, Mexico Solidarity Network, Nicaragua Network, Peacekeepers Action Network, Maryknoll Peace & Justice, International Mayan League, Las Anonas, Jean Donovan Community Peace Center, St. Joseph's University Coalitions for Justice, Youth Leadership Support Network, Philly No Sweat, Quest for Peace/Quixote Center, Share Foundation, United Students Against Sweatshop, Veterans for Peace, Vieques Fast for Justice & Peace, Washington Peace Center, White Dog Café, Witness for Peace

Our goal is to have at least 50 sponsoring organizations by Monday, July 24 when we put out a press release regarding the convergence. Let the media, Congress and the Pentagon know that we are united it our efforts to end repressive military domination, economic oppression and "impunity-as -usual." If your organization, church, or student group would like to be a sponsor, please contact us at (202) 234-3440 or (215) 473-2162. Please also provide the name and phone number of a contact person (preferably someone from your group attending the July 30th march). You can also e-mail the information to: soawatch@knight-hub.com For more information visit: www.soaw-ne.org/WNM.html

We Will Converge to...

- Voice our opposition to the Republicans refusal to acknowledge the horrific crimes against humanity that graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA) have perpetrated.

- Declare SHAME on those who voted against the appointment of an independent Truth Commission, and to keep the SOA open. Voting against closing the SOA--and any clone, means supporting those who unjustly oppress, intimidate, and massacre those who speak out on behalf of economic justice, adequate housing, health care, education, just wages AND political reforms.

- Be Visible and Vocal â€" our voices must rail against the monopolizers of the "truth," those who promote impunity over justice, and who hide behind a veil of deceit and hypocrisy.

"War No More" Peace Convergence: Sunday, July 30 ~ 9 AM ~ 15th & JFK. Street theater will begin at approx. 10 AM.

We also welcome you to take part in the

SOA Watch Direct Action on Monday, July 31.

The level of participation and legal consequences will be scaled from low risk to high risk. A meeting for the Direct Action will take place on Sat., July 29 ~ 6 PM at the Maryknoll House: 6367 Overbrook Avenue, Philadelphia (located two blocks from the R5 (Overbrook) stop (which is just one stop west of 30th Street Station). For directions and to view a local map visit http://www.soaw-ne.org/6367.html). Otherwise, please give us a call: (202) 234-3440 or (215) 473-2162.Limited housing (floor-space) is available for individuals participating in the SOA Watch Affinity groups and the "War No More" Peace Convergence. Call us as soon as possible to insure space.

YOUR PRESENCE AND YOUR VOICE WILL BE CRUCIAL! We will march for our sisters and brother in Latin America whose voices have been buried beneath mass graves which still litter the countrysides. We will speak out for the thousands whose voices are yet to be heard, stifled by intimidation, threats and torture, and for those who have continued to speak out despite the fear, despite the threats, despite the loss of family members -- "disappeared" and killed.

FOR ALL THOSE - - LET US WALK IN SOLIDARITY TO DECLARE THAT ONE DAY OUR VOICES WILL BE UNITED WITH THEIRS IN CELEBRATION OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE!

-------

OneList subscribers:


1. PROTESTERS SPEAK OUT PEACEFULLY
From: Winston Weeks <wweeks@mail.aros.net>

2. Brit's Dump da Pump
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

---------

Message: 1
From: Winston Weeks <wweeks@mail.aros.net>

PROTESTERS SPEAK OUT PEACEFULLY
July 30, 2000, 2:00pm EDT
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/index.html#philly-protest

Thousands of protesters gathered in Philadelphia today to speak their peace, and unlike recent similar events Seattle and Washington, D.C., this one came off with no clashes with police.

People who had traveled from as far away as Louisiana, marched with banners and larger-than-life puppets, protesting issues ranging from the Republican position on abortion, to Texas' record on the death penalty.

Protesters from Atlanta carried a 20-foot figure of a woman crying, protesting the School of the Americas, the U.S. government training center for Latin American police and military, located in Fort Benning, Georgia.

With more than 100 police lining Benjamin Franklin Way, which leads to Philadelphia's famous Art Museum, protesters were boisterous, but well behaved, as promised by organizer Michael Morrell.

The demonstration turned into a festival that lasted into late afternoon, with musical performances and speeches by local activists.

The coalition, claims the endorsement of almost 100 local and national organizations, including the NAACP and the National Organization for Women, said it expected between 20,000 and 100,000 people to participate in its peaceful march.

Organizations without permits will march on Monday and Tuesday. Police say they are prepared to shut down any march that disrupts normal city activity.

There is also a designated protest zone set up by police near the First Union Center. So far, less than ten groups have inquired about the 64 time slots available and one - the National Greyhound Adoption, a group that saves racing dogs - has applied for one of the 50-minute slots.

--

WILDFIRES RAVAGE WEST
July 30, 2000, 2:00pm EDT

Fire authorities in the West are calling the fires raging east of Sequoia National Forest the worst wildfire season in four years.

The blaze has burned through nearly 50,000 acres and pushed residents in the tiny village of Kennedy Meadows out of their homes. Firefighters say they won't be able to fully contain the blaze until at least August tenth.

Meanwhile, an enormous range fire in northeastern Nevada is moving quickly. It's estimated at 54,000 acres. In Idaho, firefighters wrapped historic buildings in protective covering against a 60,000 acre fire burning near the Idaho-Montana border. That fire threatened a nuclear waste site. About 1,800 employees had to evacuate three buildings at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Lab.

In Colorado, authorities say they have fully contained a wildfire in Mesa Verde National Park which burned more than 23,000 acres in the nation's largest archaeological preserve

--

ALBRIGHT DISCUSSES JERUSALEM WITH VATICAN
July 30, 2000, 4:00pm EDT

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is adding Italy to her oversea visit. She will talk with Vatican officials about the Camp David Mideast peace talks.

Last Sunday, Pope John Paul made a plea for Jerusalem's holy sites to be governed internationally. Albright's spokesman says the purpose of her visit is to update the Vatican on the situation in the Middle East.

Albright is in Japan this weekend, visiting sights she missed last week at the G-8 Summit. The Secretary had to stay at Camp David to oversee the Middle East peace talks. Today, she visited an auditorium in southern Japan that has been named for her.

On Friday, Albright met with North North Korea's Foreign Minister in Thailand, marking the highest-level talks between the two countries in 50 years.

Albright late described the meeting as "friendly." Although the two spoke little about North Korea's missile program, she describes the meeting as a historic step away from the "hostility of the past."

---

US SERGEANT PLEADS GUILTY TO KOSOVO MURDER
July 29, 2000, 12:00pm EDT

A US Army staff sergeant plead guilty to charges Friday that he sodomized and murdered a 11-year-old Albanian girl while on peacekeeping duty in Kosovo.

A panel of officers in Germany will sentence Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi, 36, on Monday. He could be given a life sentence without the chance of parole. Army prosecutors did not ask for the death penalty. Ronghi will serve his sentence in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, KS.

The girl, Merite Shabiu, was found dead outside the town of Vitina on January 13.

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ARAFAT PLEDGES SUPPORT FOR PEACE PROCESS
July 29, 2000, 3:10pm EDT

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said today that he is ready to continue the Middle East peace process and that reports that he was inflexible during the recent Camp David summit were untrue.

Arafat called such reports "Israeli propoganda."

"They are trying to put (out) big lies about what happened at Camp David," Arafat said.

The Palestinian leader said his main goal was the implementation of existing agreements after visiting with French President Jacques Chirac Saturday.

Arafat is staging a multi-national trip to increase support for the Palestinian position.

President Clinton said in an interview Friday that the United States would review its relationship with the Palestinians if they made a unilateral declaration of statehood.

Arafat has declared he will announce an independent Palestinian state September 13, 2000, with or without a peace deal with Israel.

"I think that there should not be a unilateral declaration. And if there is, our entire relationship will be reviewed. I think it would be a big mistake to...walk away from the peace process," President Clinton told Israel Television.

Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Arafat concluded 15 days of Middle East peace talks at Camp David earlier this week, but the talks produced no peace deal.

Clinton said a unilateral declaration of statehood would be followed immediately by an international response. The president did not say what steps the U.S. might take, but congressional lawmakers have threatened to introduce legislation to stop aid to the Palestinians if statehood is declared.

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July 28, 2000, 5:45pm EDT FUJIMORI RE-ELECTION SPARKS PROTESTS

Protesters faced off with police as Alberto Fujimori was sworn into office for an unprecedented third term as Peru's president.

In Congress, Fujimori's opponents shouted, "Stop the repression!" as they walked out immediately before he was sworn in.

At least 35 have been injured in clashes between police and demonstrators.

An estimated 40,000 riot police in gas masks patrolled downtown Lima. According to witnesses, shots were heard and police had fired tear gas into a crowd of hundreds. The protesters also set a former education ministry building on fire.

Despite the unrest, Fujimori outlined his goals as "strengthening of democratic institutions ... and the creation of jobs and prosperity."

--------------

Brit's Dump da Pump

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 00:32:28 -0700
From: ivan buchbinder <pentaske@memes.com>

Y'all, Well I must admit the British can certainly get organized and effective, whereas WE seem to moan & groan and sit on are collective asses. Any readings on the fire's in Idaho by the way?

Later
http://www.freecargo.co.uk/sbta/dumpthepump/dump_the_pump_campaign.htm